Last chance to see: a photographic tour of Earth's doomed ice

This article was taken from the June 2012 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Skirting the border of Uganda and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo is the gateway to one of the most remote
places on Earth: the Rwenzori
Mountains.

Rarely visited or known outside
moutaineering circles, the Rwenzoris' 1,000km2 of
Unesco-listed national park contains six peaks above 4,600m,
including Africa's fourth highest, Mount Stanley. The range is home
to a wealth of fauna -- 177 species of birds alone can be found
there.

For 500,000 years, the upper
altitudes of these peaks were covered in a thick layer of ice --
glaciers that lie only 43km from the Equator. Now less than
1km2 of ice remains and some geographers estimate that there
will be no ice left within a decade. This ecological deadline has
spurred Danish photographer Klaus Thymann to form Project Pressure, a
nonprofit collaboration of photographers, scientists, web
developers and cartographers around the world who are working to
create a record of ice on every continent.

Part digital archive, part atlas,
part touring exhibition, part "mass-engagement tool" (think Google
Earth for glaciers), Project Pressure is Thymann's vision for
providing scientists with a permanent record of today's
glaciers.

"You could say, 'Why not just get
some satellite images?'" Thymann says. "But I think it's very
important to have an artistic impression of what the worldlooked like before these glaciers are gone
forever. And thwireat's where the Rwenzoris fit in. It has been
incredibly difficult to find out what's left and what's not. Even
satellite images are scarce."

Detailed maps are hard to come by
and glaciers are often so remote that data that's been collected in
the past is outdated. This means that Thymann isn't just
documenting -- he's discovering. Armed with a pair of Hasselblad
501cc manual film cameras, two GPS units, a compass, two Canon 5Ds as well as tripods, lenses, protein bars and
water-purification tablets, Thymann has aimed to marry art and
science to record a natural phenomenon in terminal
decline.

Project Pressure has existed in beta since 2008 and
the platform will launch fully in 2013 with geolocated photography
of glaciers in 25 places, including Iceland, the US, Chile,
Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Ecuador, Greenland, Alaska, Norway
and Uganda. Users will be able to access the organisation's Mass
Engagement & Listing Technology platform from anywhere and
capture a picture of a glacier that will automatically store time,
location and compass direction as metadata. That photograph will
end up on a virtual map along with other images of the same place.
All content will be open source, with high-resolution imagery free
to scientists and educators.

To give his images context, Thymann
approached London agency We Are
What We Do, a non-profit that promotes social and environmental
issues by encouraging behavioural change. The team had developed Historypin, an open-source
online archive of tagged photos that brings to life how places have
changed over time.

During his research, Thymann made
some startling discoveries: in the Rwenzoris he wanted to see if
there were any glaciers on the far side of Mount Stanley. So he
used an old map that had been stitched digitally into the GPS data
to locate a path leading into a trail that hadn't been used in
decades. For three hours, he hacked his way through dense nettle
and dead heather. Then, at the top
of a high ridge, he rounded a corner and gasped: before him was a
patchwork of forgotten glaciers that were still clinging to the
crenulations of Mount Stanley.